Obviously if you were deciding which Greek island to choose for a holiday on your own with a three-year-old, and somebody said, “Well, for God’s sake don’t go to Santorini. It might look like heaven, but there are hardly any beaches, because the villages are all at the top of steep volcanic cliffs, and it’s really expensive and full of couples on luxury honeymoons, and there’s nothing for kids to do, just loads of grownup restaurants where people gaze at each other like moony swans”, well, I think you can probably guess what’s coming next.
I nodded at this sage advice, and booked our flights there immediately, because, despite all those warnings, I had seen some really nice pictures of it on Instagram. And I think that, at the end of our lives, it’s the photographs we will remember. Other people’s, largely.
So off my daughter and I went, a couple of weeks ago, to an island formed from volcanic lava that hardened into black rock. An island that now charges you thousands of euros to spend a couple of nights in one of the tiny white cave dwellings that cling to its cliffs, magically transformed into some of the most glamorous hotels in the world.
We didn’t stay in one of them, obviously; we stayed down a dirt track in a new-build that charged €50 a night. But we visited the glamorous cave village of Oia every day, just to swoon, and sigh, and make each other giggle, and take photos, and swoon again. And for me to spend the first two days quietly judging all the Chinese and Japanese couples with their selfie sticks, and then the next four days coming to terms with the deeper truth that I really longed to buy one myself, because then I could have taken endless pictures of us together with the romantic view behind us. Which is when I realised that my small child and I had become honeymooning newlyweds, too.
There is a moment in Julia Sweeney’s brilliant book, If It’s Not One Thing It’s Your Mother, in which the actor explains how she and her daughter sort of accidentally got married to each other. Sweeney was single when she adopted her baby daughter, so they became a family of two people. When the kid was about six, they went to a dinner party near their home in Los Angeles. All around the table sat married friends, and after a couple of hours, the six-year-old put her arm around her mother in a proprietorial fashion, a bit like a husband might, and said they should probably be getting home now, because they both had to get up early in the morning.
“I realise now, in retrospect,” Sweeney writes, “that Mulan thought she and I were a couple.”
Thank God I read that book soon after my daughter and I became a family of two, otherwise I’d have been having lots of unspeakable worries about whether it looks weird to love each other quite as much as we do. Still, it wasn’t entirely like that on the Greek island, where waiters would reappear at our restaurant table with a rose, or blow kisses from across the street. Or, to be specific, blow kisses at my daughter, who grew fabulously adept at blowing them back and basking in her newfound glory as the only natural blonde on the island. It was mortifying. They were all in love with her, not me.
Still, I managed to win her back on our last night, when we stayed up way past our bedtime and walked along a cobbled street full of shops selling gold, before turning a corner on to a view of the caldera that is said to have swallowed Atlantis. The rippling black Aegean, the stars, the lights twinkling all the way down to the bay: it took my breath away.
We squeezed each other’s hands and I thought about our imminent return to east London. “Look at that, babe,” I said. “It’s nothing like Victoria Park, is it?”
And she stared out into the magical darkness with me, and said, “No, Mummy, it’s not.” And then she added, “It’s like Rowntree Park. In York. Where Granny takes me and I have to wear my purple jogging bottoms.”
Anyway, I really love my daughter, but I think I’m ready to meet someone else now.
